There was a lot of good coverage (SocialToo, EquityKicker, TechCrunchIT) on Twitter's API rate limits this week (including some outrage). I think Nic Brisburne and TechcrunchIT are spot on when they point to the foundations of a business model. I'd actually go further and say that there are probably a whole bunch of business models here. Apart from the obvious possibility of licensing the whole pipe, there are quite a few things twitter could do.
- A variety of usage licenses (commercial, non-commercial but also potentially "reseller" licenses,
- Clustered by topics, tags, location and a whole lot of criteria,
- Or, even more interesting - clusters by social graph or even user profile characteristics.
Some users may be turned off the service if it's too invasive, but a whole host of third party services are already deep scanning twitter content, and many twitter users want to be "heard" in any case.
As the volume of the whole feed grows (keep twittering!)it becomes less and less easy to handle the main stream and either twitter itself could offer pre-filtered content bundles or allow downstream resellers to do this. All of this could be done with different API queries, but prepackaged bundles would already go a long way.
How much could they sell the stream for? This is hard to say, but certainly there seems to be a case for keeping costs low for considerable time. Twitter has a shot at become the global "alert message" infrastructure if it leverages its interconnection with different devices (input) and access for API partners well.
A great example of an API being a potential major key to revenue (forget ads...).
Off to post this on twitter I guess...
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